These worries were heightened during the CES 2024 event last week, the biggest technology convention in the world, held in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Of the slew of advanced technologies on display, robot baristas were seen making coffee on an order basis. One robot was called ADAM, which could interact with customers, and take and fulfil orders, and can even prepare some food dishes. The bot combines AI and facial recognition to function.
Richtech Robotics, the producers of ADAM, explained that the robot can be a business all by itself, especially in the case of something like a foodtruck, for example.
Another example was a bartender robot that can mix a drink based on the customer’s mood, using AI and facial recognition technology. This robot was designed by Korean company Doosan and Microsoft, which in turn means that Chat-GPT also helped in creating the design of the robotic mixologist.
Naturally such innovations have workers in this sector worried about the future of their occupations. The Associated Press reported (excerpts):
The barista tipped the jug of smooth, foamy milk over the latte, pouring slowly at first, then lifting and tilting the jug like a choreographed dance to paint the petals of a tulip. Latte art is a skill that can take months if not years of practice to master — but not for this barista powered by artificial intelligence.
Robots of all kinds caused a stir on the show floor this week at the annual CES technology trade show in Las Vegas.
It’s innovations like this that worry Roman Alejo, a 34-year-old barista at the Sahara hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip, who can’t help but wonder if the clock is ticking on hospitality jobs in the age of AI.
It is very scary because tomorrow is never promised. A lot of AI is coming into this world. It is very scary and very eye-opening to see how humans can think of replacing other humans.
He said
The world’s largest tech show put those fears back under the spotlight just a little over a month after the casino workers union in Las Vegas ratified new contracts for 40,000 members, ending a bitter, high-profile fight that called attention to AI’s threat to union jobs.
“Technology was a strike issue and one of the very last issues to be resolved,” said Ted Pappageorge, the Culinary Workers Union’s secretary-treasurer who led the teams that negotiated new five-year contracts, narrowly averting a historic strike at more than a dozen hotel-casinos on the Strip.
Hospitality workers told The Associated Press in interviews over eight months of bargaining that they were willing to take a cut in pay while on strike to win stronger job protection against inevitable advancements in technology. That includes technology already at play at some resorts: self check-in stations, automated valet ticket services and robot bartenders known as “tipsy robots.”
Pappageorge said the emergence of robotics in the hospitality and service industry has been on the union’s radar for years. The difference now, he told The Associated Press this week, “is the combination of artificial intelligence and robotics.”
Experts say that breakthrough in AI technology has forced labor unions to rethink how they negotiate with companies. […]
What is going to happen to these people and what rights do they have? And what happens to them if they lose their job to a robot?
Bill Werner, an associate professor in the hospitality department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said
In its latest contract, the union cushioned its so-called safety net for workers, winning $2,000 in severance pay for each year worked if a job is eliminated by tech or AI, as well as the option to try to move to a different department within the company.
[…] Meng Wang, co-founder of food tech startup Artly Coffee, one of the more than 4,000 exhibitors at CES this year, said he isn’t in the business of eliminating jobs. Wang said Artly’s autonomous barista bots can help fill a labor shortage in the service industry.Baristas have a hard job. It’s very labor intensive, long hours. The pay is not that good. What we are doing is not replacing jobs. We are filling the need in the market and we are bringing specialty coffee to more places.
He said
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
The whole mantra I continue to hear some of the older folks say is, ‘Oh, just get a new job. Just get out there and work. Gen-Z is lazy.’ Big talk. What are people supposed to do when real wages cannot keep up, corporations are not willing to pay a decent wage, and then AI comes in and displaces the staff, and they lack the necessary skills needed to climb the latter or work certain jobs, when parents did not train them and school brainwashed them?
Economic conditions will only worsen as more and more people continue to get displaced by AI, chatbots, and autonomous robotics replacing their jobs.
Thus were they defiled with their own works, and went a whoring with their own inventions.
Psalm 106:39
[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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The tech barons/IT/AI nerds need to train staff to fix these machines when they break down etc. Train a new class of workers.
Meanwhile while they are out of a job keeping searching for work that is what I did.